Stunt planes, hot dogs and digital visitors. De Morgen searches for the saboteur in the new season of De Mol. These are the most striking moments and theories from episode five. Attention: spoilers!
The mole book of De Morgen:
Favorite quote: ‘Met rough am I nothing.’ Just before the elimination, Thomas makes it clear that West Flemish people sometimes experience a Babylonian confusion of tongues among themselves. The vocabulary of his fellow countryman Lieselot is not always clear to him in the heat of battle.
Bird of the week: of hespmus. An ingenious language construction that Comfort creates when she tries to solve a rebus while blindfolded. The correct answer, hummus, will come later.
By mole: thomas. Admittedly, the key question in this section had so many different answers in recent weeks that the mole book felt like a bingo form. But a smart player like Thomas who stayed in the background for a long time and won the trust of his traveling companions is an ideal mole.
“We are about halfway. I think it is now a phase in which you gradually have to know who the mole is.” Just before he completes his fifth elimination test, Ruben in his twenties lets out a sigh. For 12 days now, a savvy traveler has been doing his utmost to make all the group games go wrong unnoticed. That works out nicely: of the 64,600 euros that could be earned to date, only 16,820 euros actually ended up in the pot.
Ruben claims he has no idea who the mole is, reopening the debate about which group has an easier time exposing the saboteur. Candidates travel together for weeks and as a result receive much more information, but they do miss the carefully edited overview that television viewers are presented with on Sundays. Although the question does not have a conclusive answer, the unfiltered gaze of the candidates in the fifth episode is indeed enviable.
For the first trial, all participants will receive reinforcements from Belgium. Their loved ones appear on tablets mounted on moving robots and follow the game via a video link. It looks a bit like a beta version of Westworld, but there isn’t much time for hilarity about the clumsily dressed robots. Thomas, Ruben and Lieselot are blindfolded and have to manage a dinner party with the help of their digital loved ones. They earn 500 euros for every five hot dogs they bring to a hungry American.
That is less obvious than it seems. The ingredients can only be unlocked by successfully completing small assignments. For example, they have to solve dilemmas, fish the right meat from a pan and recognize Morse codes. The viewer does not really get to see how the proverbial sausage is made exactly. In the editing, Lieselot in particular seems to have a hard time communicating with her visitor, but it is not clear who makes the most mistakes and wastes most of the time. In the end, only four hot dogs end up in the stomach of the hungry American. A poor result in a feasible assignment, although the mole probably doesn’t care about that.
While the dinner party is going on, Comfort, Lancelot and Toos further in Tucson are also in the dark. They shop blindfolded in a local supermarket and let their robotized visitors guide them along the shop shelves. The road to a possible yield of 4,000 euros is only littered with communication problems and wrong tracks. To discover which ingredients they need, they must first solve rebuses. This results in linguistically ingenious constructions such as ‘hespmus’, but in the meantime a considerable part of the battery level of the robots is lost.
By the way, candidates in a tight spot make crazy jumps. In a rash attempt to score an extra $1,000, Lancelot knocks over a tower of cereal boxes. As a result, he is out of the game and 2,000 euros of the bet goes up in smoke. Lancelot’s youthful and seemingly thoughtless bravado could also be a cover for sabotage, but the mole usually takes a less ostentatious approach. Comfort, for example, wastes a remarkable amount of time by losing her robot and can only redeem 400 euros in the end. Toos achieves the same score.
In the second major game of the episode, it is more evident to judge the performance of the candidates. Thomas, Lieselot and Lancelot get the biggest responsibility and can earn 4,500 euros by guessing three movie titles. They can unlock three tips by completing an obstacle course with a drone. For a fourth and decisive tip, they have to call on the help of Comfort, Toos and Ruben. They sit in the back of a sports plane and describe to their fellow candidates which stunts the pilot performs. If the players on the ground recognize the sequence of stunts, they can watch part of the movie. If they guess incorrectly, they will be shown a clip from a random movie.
It is a game in which Thomas in particular attracts attention. He has a very difficult time controlling the drone and later lets out crucial information about the correctly chosen film fragment Hook omitted. In the end, only one film is guessed correctly, just because Lieselot and Lancelot split the sheets.
Just before the fifth elimination, money is wasted one last time. The candidates on the ground are told that one of the other group members may not have been on the sport plane at all. If they can correctly estimate whether that is correct, they will earn pass questions and 1,500 euros for the group pot. For the mole it is again more interesting to stand on the ground and thus be able to weigh in on the decision. Perhaps it is therefore not so striking that Lieselot, Lancelot and Thomas make the wrong choice. The latter ‘candidate’ is decisive.
At the end of the episode, Lieselot sees the red screen. After a miss in the first episode, the altruistic butcher from West Flanders systematically ignored pass questions and exemptions, but you don’t buy victory with sympathy points From Mol. Those who miss Lieselot next week can console themselves with the thought that the game will only become more interesting as candidates drop out. Because the mole is demanding more and more screen time and is stepping into the spotlight.
